LessThanDot

Less Than Dot is a community of passionate IT professionals and enthusiasts dedicated to sharing technical knowledge, experience, and assistance. Inside you will find reference materials, interesting technical discussions, and expert tips and commentary. Once you register for an account you will have immediate access to the forums and all past articles and commentaries.

LTD Social Sitings

Note: Watch for social icons on posts by your favorite authors to follow their postings on these and other social sites.

This is a small review of Zero Day: A Novel by Mark Russinovich
If you are a windows user/developer then the name Mark Russinovich might seem familiar to you, Mark is of course the guy who started Sysinternals, he discovered the Sony rootkit on their CDs and is now a technical fellow at Microsoft. In other words, Mark knows what he talks about when writing about zero day attacks. So what does zero day mean anyway? Here is what wikipedia has about zero day

A zero-day (or zero-hour or day zero) attack or threat is a computer threat that tries to exploit computer application vulnerabilities that are unknown to others or the software developer, also called zero-day vulnerabilities. Zero-day exploits (actual software that uses a security hole to carry out an attack) are used or shared by attackers before the developer of the target software knows about the vulnerability.
The term derives from the age of the exploit. A “zero day” attack occurs on or before the first or “zeroth” day of developer awareness, meaning the developer has not had any opportunity to distribute a security fix to users of the software

The story is about a terrorist organization that tries to bring the US and European systems down by launching a whole variety of viruses (virii) written by the Russian coder superphreak. Our hero must try to find out what the virus does, who created it and how to stop it. He also warned people about September 11th and nobody listens because he wasn’t persistent enough, he doesn’t want to make the same mistake again. Will he succeed? I won’t spoil it here but the books has some major turns and twist that will make it difficult to put the book down.

The book is written in a style similar to Michael Crichton or Dan Brown, the chapters are fast paced and short. The book is hard to put down, it is a page turner and you will stay past your bed time trying to find out what will happen next.

About the Author

Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.